Why is Location Important in Marketing for Healthcare?

Location matters even more in healthcare than in other industries. Take a moment to learn more about how marketing for healthcare should focus on location and its benefits. 

WHY DOES LOCATION MATTER? 

Patients aren’t going to travel hundreds of miles to see their family physician for a checkup or flu shot. If they’re injured and need to go to an ER and have to decide between a hospital that is five miles away or twenty miles away, they’re going to whichever is most accessible. 

Location matters in healthcare because it helps to drive customer awareness and, in turn, increases conversion rates. 

HOW CAN LOCATION BE USED IN A MARKETING STRATEGY? 

Traditionally, marketing was limited to 210 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) or media markets. These areas were designed to help run advertisements on radio and TV. 

In the best case, DMAs were centered on a metropolitan area and were able to service that one area. For example, the New York, New York DMA covers over 7 million homes in a close targeted area. In the worst cases, a single DMA could stretch across state lines and cover hundreds of miles, like the Salt Lake City DMA that covers parts of Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming. 

Large rural DMAs made marketing a terrible investment in healthcare. Even though a hospital or healthcare provider was based in a major city like Salt Lake City, the ad reached an audience over 200 miles away. Even if those audience members needed help, there were closer healthcare providers.

Digital marketing changed that narrative by ignoring DMAs and using geofencing instead. Geofencing allows an organization to target customers based on their current location or where they have been within the past 364 days. Targeted locations can be much smaller than DMAs.

The smallest DMA geographically is New York, NY, but that’s still a vast area in terms of geofencing. Geofencing can easily target a single building.

Not only can geofencing provide pinpoint accuracy with location, but it can also provide that accuracy everywhere. It’s not limited to major metropolises. Geofencing can be used everywhere, from New York to Plainville, Kansas. 

Geofencing finally makes healthcare advertising cost-effective and worthwhile. Instead of placing ads with customers and patients well outside their service area, healthcare providers can set digital boundaries and reach only the customers they want.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF TARGETING SPECIFIC LOCATIONS? 

By being able to target specific locations, healthcare providers can:

• Increase brand awareness
  Customers won’t come to you if they don’t know who you are. Localized healthcare digital marketing campaigns help customers learn more about you, your brand, and the services you provide so that when they need to turn to a healthcare provider, they will turn to you.  

• Improve ad reach
  Ad reach is the number of people who have viewed your ad at least once. Digital marketing with geofencing is more cost-effective and allows for greater reach.

• Improve ROI
  Geotargeting helps you get the most from your budget by avoiding wasting advertisements on people who don’t live in your target market. By narrowing the scope of your marketing, you’re more likely to reach the right person at the right time and see meaningful and better results. 

• Speak directly to the audience
  Location-based marketing campaigns are great because they limit the audience you speak to. This allows you to address their problems, thoughts, needs, and concerns, showing them that you understand who they are, their fears, and what they are experiencing in their lives. This creates a stronger connection with your brand.

CHOOSE AGILITY

Agility provides geofencing tools that are simple to set up, manage, and maintain. With Agility, you have the digital advertising tools to ensure that your marketing campaigns reach the right person at the right time and place.

Contact us today to see how location-based marketing and geofencing can improve your healthcare advertising strategies.